As I spend more and more time working, playing, etc., I’m starting to really appreciate that one of the biggest obstacles to participating with the intensity, jam, and love that I can bring is the feeling that I could be doing something else. That sense of optionality holds me back from digging deep into that extra 10-20% that allows me to perform at my best. I started thinking about this as I was building a program for our students that tackles that intangible motivation-com

I had a student question me on a paper he was asked to write. It was an English paper on identity and how he see the concept of identity present in his school. He’s an avid reader, loves literature and vehemently opposed writing a paper like this. He asked, “what’s even the point of this coach? This has nothing to with any of the works we’re studying” As you can imagine, I live for this kind of “teachable” moment. Why? Because there exists a brilliant opportunity to enlarge t

The Ontario Ministry of Education spends somewhere between $100 and $300 million on professional development (PD) per year (as an FYI, this is a reasoned estimate using ChatGPT and Google) - regardless of the exact figure, those boundaries represent a lot of money, the type of money that lets someone buy a drink, chips, AND cookies with their Subway 6-inch Cold Cut Combo without even thinking about it. And to be clear, I firmly believe that allocating provincial government do

We’re in the thick of exams and in the years since COVID I’ve observed the system’s deliberate attempt to “de-escalate” the anxiety created by exams. I find it disappointing that instead of coaching our students to respond to stress so they can rise to the occasion, they’ve elected to “neuter” exams by completely replacing them with culminating projects or reducing difficulty by meaningfully decreasing the volume of testable content. Should exams be the only type of culminati

The multitude of relevant skills learned by participating in the classroom apply across so many career paths The decreased relevance of traditional educational models is largely rooted in the curricula’s seeming lack of direct applicability to modern day jobs. We even see a lot of figureheads, some more prominent than others, criticizing traditional education as a relevant conduit to success. I think many of these pundits are missing the point. School is not just about learn